Lost Years
by Midnyght Saber
Summary: Ten years have passed since she died, and in all that time, he has watched her son fall to darkness and take both worlds with him. Now, all he has is regret and pain, suffering for the things he never did while she was still alive. While they all were.


**Disclaimer:**_ Danny Phantom_ and all related characters and information are the property of Butch Hartman and Viacom International, Inc. "Vlad" is the property of Inkubus Sukkubus and Resurrection Records.

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For anyone that wants to know, this picks up during the episode "The Ultimate Enemy" and ends with Danny's arrival at what's left of Vlad's manor. This song just clicked with me as a very fitting piece of music for the way that Vlad became in that episode after Maddie's death. The title being "Vlad" was just a very fitting coincidence.

* * *

Tired eyes blinked slowly open, still hazed with sleep, and the elder rolled over on the dilapidated cot that served as his bed, wiping the back of his hand over his eyes, struggling to rise out of the fog of his nightmare-filled unconsciousness. Blinking once more, he looked over to the picture that greeted him every time he woke, a picture that brought both comfort and melancholy to his life, for though the photo showed him a moment of happiness from his youth, he also knew that the red-headed beauty in that picture was buried in her hometown, ten years dead.

Reaching out to the photo, an image frozen forever in time, Vlad felt fresh tears stinging at the corners of his eyes, and he ran the tattered cloth of his sleeve over them, wiping them away before they could fall. Too many mornings had begun that way, and each time the tears would stop, he'd spend days fighting off another flood. True, the explosion a decade ago had killed both of his best friends, as well as one of their children and Daniel's best friends, but Maddie alone was the one above all else who he felt the most pain for losing. He had, after all, still been in love with her.

**How I've loved you**

**And will always love you**

Ten years he had spent knowing his folly, realizing that the time he had spent trying to destroy what Jack and Maddie had was time he had wasted, time that he could have used to grow close to them as they had been before his accident, and time he could have spent being a friend to them and an uncle-by-proxy to the children. Maybe then…

Maybe then, Daniel would have never become what he now was.

Swinging his legs off of the cot, he sat up, taking with him the picture as he stood and moved to the bank of computers, only a few screens still functioning all these years later. Sitting down, he set the photo next to him, his eyes wandering over the image of Maddie once more before turning to the screens, each of them currently displaying the images being relayed from the drones he had stationed both in the real world and the Ghost Zone. A shell of his former self he may have been, but that hadn't kept him from doing what he could to defend himself against the monster that Maddie's son had become.

Typing in a quick command, the lowest screen suddenly shifted it view, playing not real-time images from just outside of Amity Park, but rather some of the video he had collected back before Daniel had fallen to the darkness. As the system loaded the video, Vlad's head turned, his eyes scanning the corner of the room he was in where the human side of Daniel had been destroyed by the ghost entity that had been born of the union between Phantom and Plasmius, and he felt the bile rise in his throat as the images flew through his head.

**You were the one**

**To light the stars in my night**

He was probably just as much to blame for the specter that had destroyed the world as was Daniel, seeing as he was the one to remove Phantom from Daniel, and thus render Phantom without a conscience. He had created the Gauntlets that had the capability to remove a ghost from a human, and he had fallen victim to his own invention.

Turning back to the screens before him, he smiled softly at the images of the Fenton family, along with the Manson and Foley children so oft seen with them, spending an afternoon in the park, one of the few days that they truly had been able to relax. Vlad shook his head sadly, knowing that the peace so rarely enjoyed by the family was partially because he had never been able to bring himself to tell them what had happened that day in the college labs, and it was the reason that their son, unbeknownst to them, carried the same affliction of ghost genetics.

Tapping a quick keystroke, the video paused in the midst of Maddie laughing at either something someone had said or something that had happened off-camera, but the look on her face was one that Vlad lived his life to see. Memories flooded back of all the time the three of them had spent going to college improv shows, and the sound of her laughter rang strong in his mind, bringing the shadow of a smile to his weary face.

**Why can't one of such beauty live forever?**

**Hear my soul scream its plight**

Un-pausing the video, he entered a new command, the system loading up the series of fight recordings that Vlad still had, watching over the battles, analyzing every move that the younger half-ghost made, wondering where it was that the blight of his ghost half had begun to taint his mind. Never formally trained in combat of any kind, he was impressed at Danny's agility and ability to hold his own against the lesser ghosts, and his intuitive nature and improvisational spirit gave him an impressive upper hand, though nowhere in any image could Vlad find traces of the darkness that had forged the creature that plagued the land in the present. Even the diagnostics programs of the drones sensed nothing other than the latent ghost energies and the way his power fluctuated as he fought. Never once in all those images could anyone have seen the future awaiting him.

**You were the gift of joy**

**You were my light**

Laying his head down against the desk, Vlad closed his eyes for a moment, letting his own internal computer run through his memories, bringing life back to the woman who so enraptured his heart, and he felt another waves of tears threatening to come on and overtake him once more. Pinching the bridge of his nose, he let the feeling subside, calming himself before giving into the pull of his thoughts once more.

The images flew past in a flurry, from college to the reunion to the various video recordings he'd taken before everything had fallen apart, and the guilt only tore at him harder.

He had known. He realized what the ghost genetics could do to a person, what that ghost within Daniel could have made him do, and he had been impressed that it took so much to break the child when he himself had fallen almost instantly. From the moment he discovered that Daniel was like him, he wanted to take the child under his wing, make him into something better, something stronger and more able to handle the taint of the specter lying within, yet each time he had tried had ended in failure.

And his ultimate failure was actually listening to Daniel as the teen drowned in the sorrow and depression of the loss of his family and friends.

**You gave so much to life**

**My angel of the night**

He had tried so hard to take what he felt he deserved, his mind convoluted by the promises of power that the Plasmius entity had made, that he had sacrificed so much precious time, and he had sacrificed the lives of his friends because of his selfishness.

As they often said, hindsight was 20/20, and for once in his life, Vlad cursed the person who had first spoken those words, because though they were meant as advice to many, to him, it was a blade through the heart, and the tide of tears would no longer allow itself to be held back. Collapsing onto folded arms, the elder man cried as if he would never be able to stop.

**Oh, hear me call you**

**I'll always call for you**

**Though you are no longer here**

He wasn't sure how long he spent like that, but as the tears finally began to dry up and his vision cleared, he leaned up far enough to switch the screen's view back to Amity Park, and his heart stopped cold in his chest.

The shield that, for so long, had protected the city and its inhabitants from the terror was now gone, and the trails of smoke curling skyward told more than any close-up image would ever have to. The phantom had found a weakness in the shielding, and he had attacked with all the vehement rage of a wild beast. Without even sending the drone closer, Vlad knew that the street would be littered with bodies and broken machinery, the storm drains red and clogged with freshly-spilled blood, and the city would be drowned in a discordance of screams.

**May my voice be carried**

**To your spectral ears**

**I need to know you are near**

As far as he had known, the Fenton's portal was still active, though securely locked, within the city, and that would mean it was only a matter of time before he, too, would fall victim to the creature he had helped to create.

Shutting down the screens, he listened to the silence echoing around him, his body suddenly distant and numb, as if his spirit had been removed from it without a thought, and he collapsed forward onto the desk, a single word slipping past his lips before the world went dark.

**You were the gift of joy**

**You were my light**

"Vlad, are you okay?"

Blinking, he attempted to clear his vision, coming into sight with cold, white tiles. Wiping his hand over his eyes, he stopped halfway through the motion. _That voice…it can't be._

**You gave so much to life**

**My angel of the night**

Turning onto his back, he found Maddie leaning over him, a cool, damp towel in hand, Jack not too far behind, holding a bowl of cold water. He blinked a few more times, trying to prove to himself that this wasn't real.

"Are you okay, Vlad? You hit your head pretty hard when you fell."

"What…what happened?" he asked. "Where are we?"

Maddie smiled softly, running the towel over his face, and Vlad smiled softly, the sensation against his skin soothing. "We're where we've been for the past few months, silly, in a bunker just outside of Amity Park."

"We've been hiding out here since everything started going all screwy, and Danny ran away," Jack cut in. "Sam and Tucker went missing too, just a week or so ago."

**You were the gift of joy**

**You were my light**

"This can't be happening," Vlad muttered. "This can't be real."

"What can't be?" Maddie asked, turning to dip the towel into the bowl Jack held before wringing it out. "You must have really hit your head. You're very out of it right now."

The next words slipped out before he could think about them, and he looked at Maddie accusingly. "You're dead! You're both dead! Something killed you off, and took Jazmine and Samantha and Tucker, too! Daniel's dead! His ghost half and mine killed him!"

Maddie and Jack both stepped back, confusion marring their faces until they both looked at Vlad, turning slowly invisible before his eyes until they had vanished completely, leaving him once more alone with nothing more than his thoughts.

**You gave so much to life**

**My angel of the night**

Shooting up from his prone position, Vlad awoke with a start, screaming so loudly that it took him a moment or two to realize the sound wrecking his ears was his own voice. Covering his mouth with his hands, he waited until his voice could no longer create that horrid sound, and he struggled back into the chair by the desk, having fallen from it when he'd passed out.

Resting back in the chair, he closed his eyes, trying to figure out what the heck his dream had meant. It was, after all, impossible that Maddie and Jack were still alive, though he didn't doubt that they were together still in death, wherever it was they had ended up. The idea crossed his mind that they had tried to contact him from the other side, but the reality of that was slim to none, especially considering the only other 'side' was the Ghost Zone, and he'd sent enough drones there to realize that they weren't there either.

Thoughts of the Zone turned his thoughts once more to the abomination that had been created a decade earlier, and the fact that, though Daniel was indeed the first victim, the demon had been almost too methodical in his work after that. The human world was his plaything, a land of tortured screams and broken bodies, but the Zone, and its residents, posed a real threat to him in his formative years.

Skulker and Johnny 13 were the first two ghosts attacked, both so battered by the encounter that they had been permanently damaged. Johnny and Skulker had both been paralyzed from their midsections down, Johnny condemned to a wheelchair while Technus volunteered to take control of Skulker's suit in exchange for keeping the minute hunter on his feet, thus creating the being known as SkulkTech.

Box Ghost and Lunch Lady were his next targets, chosen likely because of the lack of a threat that they presented, and Box Ghost barely made it out of that encounter, his newborn daughter in tow, his wife utterly destroyed by the specter that had come after them. Walker, Bullet, and the rest of the jail's staff were taken out in one fell swoop, soon followed by every ghost within the prison, including Danny's close friend Wulf.

One by one, the ghosts that had haunted Daniel had been taken down, ripped apart by his growing power, and five and a half years after his reign of terror had begun, the dark entity took on the greatest forces in the Ghost Zone, securing his future among the world. In a matter of only a month in the human world, he had utterly destroyed Clockwork, as well as the Council of Observants, and upon finding out about the other elder ghosts, annihilated Nocturne, Undergrowth, Vortex, and Pandora. Soon thereafter was the fall of Pariah Dark, and only by falling to his knees and pledging his eternal loyalty to the entity known as Dan Phantom did Fright Knight survive his previous master's fate.

Only once he'd leveled nearly every part of the Zone and taken out the ghosts he felt would pose the greatest threat did his attention turn back to the human world.

**How I've loved you**

**Oh, calling for you**

**I'm calling for you now**

There were so many days that Vlad had wondered what could have happened if he had only approached Clockwork before Dan had come fully into himself and gone back in time.

**You were the gift of joy**

**You were my light**

There were so many mornings he awoke wondering what would have been if he had told Jack and Maddie of their son's condition…and his, for that matter.

**You gave so much to life**

**My angel of the night**

There were so many nights that he'd lie in his cot, staring at the ruins of the ceiling, where the what if's and could haves and should haves and might haves all jumbled up in his head and plagued him until he'd fall into a restless slumber, possessed then by the nightmare images that Nocturne was no longer there to control, and he feared that he would spiral into madness before long.

**You were the gift of joy**

**You were my light**

Turning once more to the bank of screens, he powered up the ones still operational, his robotic 'eyes' scanning the realms for any sign of the being that had ruined so many lives. From drone to drone, the screens shifted their images every minute, starkly detailing the emptiness that has possessed the Ghost Zone for so long.

**You gave so much to life**

**My angel of the night**

Only when one of the images on the screens began to shake did his attention actually focus on something, and entering a quick keystroke, the single drone whose image could not stay steady began to refocus its lens, tightening the zoom until a single figure came into view, mouth wide in the throes of the sonic attack that was shaking the drone. Only seconds later did the image begin to crack, and with a tortured whine of metal and fraying wires, the image died away to static, the drone likely destroyed.

**You were the gift of joy**

**You were my light**

Vlad sighed heavily, knowing now that Dan knew he was still alive, and very much paying attention to him. No one who ever paid mind to Dan Phantom lived much longer.

**You gave me so much love**

**My angel of the night**

Running his finger along the image on his desk, he fought back a tear, Maddie's smiling face looking at him from the picture, never able to know just what was coming for him.

**You were the gift of joy**

**You were my light**

There was always a particular sound that came with a ghost moving out of the Zone and into our world, and Vlad knew without looking that the one person he never wanted to see again in his natural life was standing there behind him. The reflection in one of the dead screens, of the teenager that had died years ago, was nothing more than just a façade Dan was wearing.

**I live with demons now**

**My angel of the night**

"Come to kick a defenseless, old man while he's down?"


End file.
